In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 7 -- Nightmare · 4:04pm Jan 5th, 2018
At home, Bella tries to avoid thinking about Edward, so she… Well, just read this. Stuff like this is why Twilight is as long as it is:
Once in my room, I locked the door. I dug through my desk until I found my old headphones, and I plugged them into my little CD player. I picked up a CD that Phil had given to me for Christmas. It was one of his favorite bands, but they used a little too much bass and shrieking for my tastes. I popped it into place and lay down on my bed. I put on the headphones, hit Play, and closed my eyes, but the light still intruded, so I added a pillow over the top half of my face.
Holy crap. I mean, really. Was this edited at all? This reads more like an amateur fanfiction writer trying to get their word count up than something that was actually professionally published. Is it “realistic” to show Bella getting her stuff? I guess, but that doesn’t make it good. Little “realistic” touches like this pop up everywhere in the book (none as bad as this, though) and do absolutely nothing but add to the page count.
Eventually, Bella falls asleep, where she dreams about Jacob turning into a wolf and fighting Edward. I had to sidestep so the Anvil of Symbolic Foreshadowing didn’t hit me as it fell. She wakes up, and, unable to fall asleep again, decides to do some research on the Internet and confront the facts. In the process, she complains her free Internet service is slow. Bella, you get what you pay for, and you haven’t paid, so getting anything means you’re coming out ahead. While she eats cereal and waits for the modem to dial up (dang, tech has marched on), we get another “realistic” touch:
I ate slowly, chewing each bite with care. When I was done, I washed the bowl and spoon, dried them, and put them away. My feet dragged as I climbed the stairs. I went to my CD player first, picking it up off the floor and placing it precisely in the center of the table. I pulled out the headphones, and put them away in the desk drawer. Then I turned the same CD on, turning it down to the point where it was background noise.
Why? Why include this? Why talk about how she chews? Why talk about her washing her dishes? Why talk about where she put her CD player? Why talk about where she put her headphones? Why? Why? WHY?
When she finally gets online, Bella goes to a search engine (unnamed) and searches for “vampire”. She says there was a lot of results to sift through: “everything from movies and TV shows to role-playing games, underground metal, and gothic cosmetic companies”. Right. Sure. A search for “vampire” doesn’t turn up anything on actual vampires in the first few results? Better find a new search engine, Bella. She eventually finds a site that seems legit, even though it’s riddled with pop-up ads (we get to hear about her closing them) and is just black text on a white background. Apparently it’s “academic-looking”.
The site is an alphabetical listing of vampire types, so Bella reads through them. It does a decent job of impressing on us that vampires are different across cultures and each one has different characteristics from the others, sometimes wildly so. Yet Bella’s still upset that none of them match up with what she’s seen and heard from Jacob. I mean, gee, it’s not like, since the Cullens have been keeping themselves secret, they’re yet another different type of vampire that no one’s seen and catalogued before, right?
Aggravated, I snapped off the computer’s main power switch, not waiting to shut things down properly. Through my irritation, I felt overwhelming embarrassment. It was all so stupid. I was sitting, in my room, researching vampires. What was wrong with me? I decided that most of the blame belonged on the doorstep of the town of Forks — and the entire sodden Olympic Peninsula, for that matter.
I’m really beginning to hate Bella. Not just dislike, actual hate. So you wanted to research vampires. What’s the big deal with that? I’ve researched dragons, werewolves, pseudoscience, mythical creatures from Africa, conlangs, how the law would deal with superheroes, the Antikythera Mechanism, and more, not because there was something important about them, but because I wanted to. (Fun fact: a lot of African vampiric creatures are birds.) I’m writing this on a website devoted to magical cartoon pony fanfiction. And you’re embarrassed? Moreover, you’re blaming the town for this? You’ve barely had a reaction to it. It would’ve been nice to hear if Forks was so boring it was driving you to do stuff like this, but you haven’t mentioned it.
To try to think better, Bella heads out into the forest near her house and finds a place to sit. As she thinks, we get an actually pretty good bit of prose:
Here in the trees it was much easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the myths and legends of a hundred different lands seemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cut bedroom.
So Bella ponders whether or not the Cullens could be vampires. Various bits and pieces fit together, and she decides that, even if the Cullens aren’t vampires, they’re probably not human. Although one of her pieces of evidence isn’t really shown: she says Edward speaks “with unfamiliar cadences and phrases that better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first century classroom”, but his style of speaking isn’t much different than anyone else’s. Now, if Edward’s a vampire, what’s Bella going to do about it?
Only two options seemed practical. The first was to take his advice: to be smart, to avoid him as much as possible. To cancel our plans, to go back to ignoring him as far as I was able. To pretend there was an impenetrably thick glass wall between us in the one class where we were forced together. To tell him to leave me alone — and mean it this time.
I was gripped in a sudden agony of despair as I considered that alternative. My mind rejected the pain, quickly skipping on to the next option.
Seriously? You barely know him! Most of your thoughts about him have been focused on how he’s so frigging hot like whoa! Why are you “gripped in a sudden agony of despair”?
So Bella decides to stay with Edward, even if he’s probably a bloodsucking monster. She heads back to her house, where… I’m sorry, this next part is almost completely pointless, but it really bugs me:
It didn’t take too much effort to concentrate on my task for the day, a paper on Macbeth that was due Wednesday. I settled into outlining a rough draft contentedly…
You went to the beach yesterday and don’t have school today. That makes today Sunday. Your paper’s due in three days and you haven’t begun a rough draft yet? You haven’t even OUTLINED a rough draft?! What kind of smart person are you? I would’ve begun working on it only a day or two after it’d been assigned! Or is it one of those wimpy papers that doesn’t need sources and is only two or three pages long? And she apparently finishes her paper in one sitting. Sure.
The next day is sunny, one of the sunniest it’s ever been in Forks, brightening Bella’s mood. At least until she realizes she can’t see her precious Edward anywhere around school. And when she reaches lunch break and goes to the cafeteria…
The place was nearly filled — Spanish had made us late — but there was no sign of Edward or any of his family.
Desolation hit me with crippling strength.
…Do I even need to say it?
Because Edward isn’t there, the rest of the day is somehow unbearable. A lecture on the rules of badminton somehow takes up the entire gym period. How many rules does badminton have? When I played it in high school, the rules amounted to, “See the birdie? Hit the birdie over the net. Don’t let the birdie hit the net, inside the court on your side, or outside the court on your opponent’s side. You can’t hit the birdie twice in a row without your opponent hitting it.”
After school, Bella talks with Charlie about a trip Jessica and Angela (some of her friends, remember?) are taking to Port Angeles to get dresses for the dance; she wants to go along. When he says yes, we get this bit:
“We’ll leave right after school, so we can get back early. You’ll be okay for dinner, right?” (Side note: Bella’s the one who cooks dinner between the two of them, since Charlie only knows how to make basic food.)
“Bells, I fed myself for seventeen years before you got here,” he reminded me.
“I don’t know how you survived,” I muttered…
That, right there, could’ve been a nice way to show how Bella and her father are bonding. Bella says, “I don’t know how you survived,” clearly, as a joke. Charlie replies with something like, “Very blandly.” They both laugh about it, since they’re comfortable with each other. But no. Bella insults her father under her breath. Our protagonist, fillies and gentlecolts.
After another sunny day at school made torturous because her visual drug of choice isn’t there, Bella and her friends head off for Port Angeles.
Finishing an essay in one sitting isn't TOO ridiculous in my opinion. Every essay I've written for college has been a start to finish process in one night, but different strokes for different folks I guess. Keep up the good work!
She is in high school, so probably yeah. That'd actually be par for the course.
Thanks for continuing to plumb these depths for our morbid amusement and improvement.
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4767650
Maybe, but considering her (chosen!) topic was whether Shakespeare's treatment of the characters in MacBeth was misogynistic, it feels a lot less genuine and more like thoughtless padding; something like that shouldn't be finished in one sitting, high school or not.
Plus, this way, I have another thing to yell at Bella for. She only gets worse from here.
4767795
Fair enough.
This series has gotten me wondering if the story could be salvaged by gutting it of the padding, whininess, and OMGSOHAWTs... And beefing up the character interactions there are clearly opportunities for.
4767810
You write it, and I may just read it. After all, it'd clearly be a better love story than Twilight. 😜
4769057
Thanks.
Sadly, my masochism doesn't run deep enough to make me want to carry out such a project.
4769098
Aw... but it'd be the ultimate fixfic. You'd be famous as that nonspecific gendered person who redeemed the irredeemable.
I feel like a lot of lines in this are jokes that COULD work, if she hadn't forgotten to say the punchline or establish the tone.